Image retrieval based on a multipurpose watermarking scheme

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet and multimedia technologies has made copyright protection and multimedia retrieval be the two most important issues in the digital world. To solve these problems simultaneously, this paper presents a multipurpose watermarking scheme for image retrieval. First, several important features are computed offline for each image in the database. Then, the copyright, annotation and feature watermarks are offline embedded into all images in the database. During the online retrieval, the query image features are compared with the exacted features from each image in the database to find the similar images. The experimental results based on a database with 1000 images in 10 classes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.